Rubenerd

Apple developer and awesome person Becky Hansmeyer wrote about Apple’s latest telephonic keynote, emphasis added:

Still, I’m left with a strange feeling after watching Tuesday’s iPhone event. It just seemed…off. The 5G marketing bonanza felt forced and nonsensical. Apple knows 5G doesn’t matter to most people, or at least, they should. The whole thing had a vibe of “we didn’t get to make the phone we wanted to make this year due to time, supply chain, and technological constraints but by golly we have to sell phones this year or our shareholders will eat us so HERE’S SOME 5G.”

I’m glad someone else thought this. I haven’t been excited, or even that interested, in new phone hardware for a long time. But the highlight clips I watched were especially cringe; and this coming from a company that unironically used courage to describe the headphone jack’s removal.

(It also doesn’t help that iOS has transitioned from something I prefer because it’s generally good, to something I tolerate because it’s better than Android. Insert obligatory reference to the old webOS and missing Palm).

Dan Benjamin of Hivelogic, 5by5, and Fireside fame posited a few years ago (paraphrased) that nobody wants to use a phone, we need it for certain features. Specifically, if something else comes along that lets us keep in touch with those around us and organise our lives, we’ll ditch these breakable glass slabs. Case in point, who other than nostalgic fools like me still carry PDAs?

Which reminds me, I found a Palm V modem on eBay, but the budget envelope for pointless stuff is empty for October. I hope it doesn’t get snatched up in the interim.

I’m invoking Betteridge’s Law here, because this post discusses the widely-circulated map by Philip Kerney titled as such. It compared the outcome of the 2016 US elections with the number of people who didn’t vote, with the implication that both Ms Clinton and Mr Orange lost to “Nobody”.

It’s an interesting visualisation, though comes with the caveat “if abstention from voting counted as a vote for Nobody”. But read the comment threads where this is posted, and a surprising number don’t read beyond the “Apathy” in the heading.

Voter disenfranchisement is a real and terrifying phenomena, even in the world’s second-largest democracy. Elections are called at times where large populations of people can’t get a work break, and in a Dickensian industrial-relations environment where they can’t demand it. People might be stuck at home. Absentee and mail ballots exist, but there are vested interests keeping people away from those.

Apathy can come from not caring to vote, but is also a reflection of attitudes towards the candidates themselves. Politics is the art of the possible, and Hillary Clinton simply didn’t resonate with voters enough to turn them out against Mr Orange. Even those who would have sided with her didn’t feel pressure to contribute, given the press call the odds in her favour. And all Mr Orange’s embarrassing bluster didn’t change the fact a record low number of people voted for him as well.

If push came to shove, why would you sacrifice precious pay and work hours to vote for a candidate who doesn’t speak to you, or in a state where the winner is almost guaranteed? And most perversely of all, it’s the people living paycheque to paycheque like this who are disproportionally affected by changes in government.

My first thought is to analyse the motivation behind the messaging when I read commentary about lazy voters, or lazy social security recipients. Here it comes across as blaming voters for difficulties voting, and for poor quality candidates. Should people put the effort in to vote? Yes, if they can. Are both sides of politics as bad as each other? No, not even close. But even if voters are at fault here for not engaging in their civic duty and responsibility, there are plenty of other stakeholders who should equally share the blame. The political machines. The parties. The press. It wasn’t just apathy.

(I say all this as someone who’s voted in every Australian state and federal election for which I’ve been eligible, in case people raise this).

I used to preface Reddit posts by warning people of its dumpster fire nature, but I’m a long-term Twitter user. People who live in glass houses shouldn’t something something.

/u/Zamaros has a couple of angles I hadn’t thought about for a long time:

What really gets me is the idea that if reality truly is just the culmination of outside stimuli, then the virtual world is every bit as meaningful as the real one. For every minecraft world, for every empty worlds.com world, for every abandoned sims game, for every bit of lost data, there is a deficit in the prime reality. These images are no different than those of Stonehenge, Machu picchu, the coliseum, the ruins of Crete, or the ancient city of Babylon. The only difference is there is no decay, leading to a strange transcendent dream-like appearance.

I can’t count how many times I’ve logged into an old VM with a copy of the Sims I abandoned years ago, or SimCity cities I made when I was a teenager. Even firing up an exploring an old version of Need For Speed, or Midtown Madness. All those worlds are still there, and they’ve aged and not aged at all.

I remember writing in an old school assignment that it’s hard to keep things clean in the real world, and harder to make things look dirty in virtual ones. I didn’t realise at the time I was describing entropy.

It’s Music Monday time! Each and every Monday, except when I don’t, I write about some music without fail. The consistency of the writing is without fail, not the music itself. It’s as though I named this series specifically for this audible content, and to coincide with a specific day of the week. Though I would take great pains to point out that the alliteratic spelling is mere coincidence. That statement is as true as alliteratic being a word. It’s perfectly cromulent and gurt by sea.

Today’s entry is, as you’ve no doubt surmised by now, entirely pointless. It’s the inevitable outcome of watching a Hololive EN stream while rearranging your turntable preamp cables, and inadvertently putting one of your favourite album covers against the TV, such that the gentleman’s face looks as though he has an avatar who’s joined in playing Minecraft.

I wonder what the Venn Diagram looks like of people who love Al Jarreau, and who watch Hololive EN Minecraft streams? Is it just Clara and I? I’d commission a study, but I spent all my mental CPU cycles today writing a two-hundred word blog post about nothing.

You can buy the album on iTunes, or preview on The YouTubes. 7Digital, please get more of his back catalogue! And don’t watch Hololive EN; especially in the evening in the background to relax while doing other things.

With summertime approaching in Sydney—though you wouldn’t know it looking given the cold we’ve had over the weekend—I’ve been looking to better protect some of my homelab gear. Ideally it’d all be co-located in a climate-controlled data centre, but where’s the fun in that? And besides, our FreeBSD bhyve PleX OpenZFS NAS now also runs Minecraft locally.

We all have CPU and GPU cooling sorted, which leaves integrated circuits on network cards. These beasts can easily run hot enough to compromise their performance, especially when you start pushing lots of traffic in summer months. The chips on my InfiniBand and Ethernet cards routinely hit 60°C, making them the hottest-running components outside the CPU.

My ultimate plan is to address airflow shortcomings with a proper new server build and case, but for now I just wanted some heatsyncs to alleviate some of the problem. Nobody (that I know) sells cooling devices specifically for NICs, but ones designed for GPU DIMMs seem to be the right size.

So when I saw the thumbnail for the above copper ones I was ready to hit buy. Until I looked closer at the specifications:

Color: Copper Tone

Wha? Sure enough, right there in the description:

Copper Tone Aluminum Heatsink

I have many questions. Wouldn’t painting the metal reduce its thermal efficiency? What would be the point of saving a few dollars to presumably impress people with your fancy PC, if you’ve spent thousands on the other components? It’s like those people in Mercs or BMWs waiting for the ERP to end in Singapore.

The real reason is they know that a certain percentage of their buyers will mistake it for real copper, and will buy because they sorted by price with the keyword copper. Those buyers will either spend their days unaware that their expensive devices aren’t being protected as much as they thought, or likely wouldn’t bother going through a returns policy for a few dollars once they’ve realised they’ve been duped.

The seller could argue they included the words Copper Tone, thereby complying with the letter of the law and relevant terms of service, if not the spirit. In the indelible words of John Siracusa, being technically correct is necessary but not sufficient.

My new MacBook Pro coincided with the release of Firefox 81.x, which lead me to think there was something wrong with the discrete GPU on this refurbished machine. Each time I loaded a site and scrolled, regardless of how heavy the page was, it would occasionally stop then lurch in an attempt to catch up. I joked with colleagues that it was a *nix VESA desktop emulation mode.

Safari and Vivaldi didn’t have the same issue, which thankfully ruled out a hardware.

I’m pleased to report now that the issue is gone as of Firefox 82. Either that, or an extension I use also updated in the interim. Either way, I’m unreasonably happy.

I used to use Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox back in the day to push against IE. Now the few of us still using it are at it again, only we use it to push against Chrome hegemony. Please use it; it’s a great browser and especially quick since the Quantum update. We need its user agent in server logs to show the world there’s still value in cross-browser testing and development. We’re already starting to see Chrome-only sites again, presumably written by people who either weren’t alive or don’t remember the lessons of the first browser wars.

Special thanks to these fine contributors for maintaining the Homebrew Cask for Firefox, the FreeBSD Gecko team, and ryoon for pkgsrc. A lot of work goes into people like me being able to install Firefox on our various platforms with a single command.

One of my favourite photos of all time is the view of the French and British engineers grinning at each other and swapping flags after they connected their sides of the Channel Tunnel. It’s such a powerful statement of unity, along with being a damn impressive feat of engineering.

Clara and I had been separated on our Minecraft map with homes thousands of blocks apart, so we decided to try the same thing. We tunneled down below the sea floor, then across in a L shape. We hit a couple of deep sea trenches which had to have underwater tunnels built, but it was an opportunity to line the walls with glass for a view.

After a solid three evenings of tunneling and dozens of used pickaxes, we broke through! And I kid you not, the meeting point was lined with gold on the top. We decided to keep it there, along with a silly sign.

Now what used to take at least 6 minutes of boating around a couple of massive peninsulas and labourious use of the W key is now a redstone-powered automatic rail cart ride. Of course now that we’ve been bitten by this bug, we’re thinking where we can extend the line to.

It’s funny that I play more games in my early 30s now than I ever did before. Maybe it’s a release?

Raf emailed with a useful comment about my FreeBSD licencing post, and why people routinely ask for GPL software in base:

It might be worth noting that OpenBSD has acceptable licenses policy page - linked from goals page (itself linked to from the main page). I see that FreeBSD has something similar and it is even touch upon in the FAQ but perhaps these aren’t visible enough or, more likely, people simply don’t (like to) read.

Agreed. I still lean towards thinking it’s more about awareness, and it’s an opportunity to help reframe the discussion away from the GPL. But eventually people do need to be motivated to find things out themselves as well.

But it does raise another interesting point: why don’t people like reading FAQs? Are they considered ancillary, a waste of time, or boring? Is there anything we can do there too? I’m not sure.

Also, I keep being given reasons to try OpenBSD. You sneaky people. 🐡

Via an old Minecraft forum thread that I liked:

“The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow; do good anyways” ~ Abel Muzorewa

Do you assess people’s worthiness of being rescued from a burning building? Whether you call the fire department, try to find water, or risk your own life to brave the flames, people with empathy and a concience will be compelled to assist.

It sounds so obvious. Yet turn the coversation to social security, and suddenly the press want to demonise recipents on the basis that they’re slack, lazy, and unmotivated. We’re asked why our hard-earned tax dollars should fund people who only sit on their couch and contribute nothing to society. But people who stash trillions in offshore accounts to avoid tax are just using legal loopholes, dontchaknow?

The alternatives are—conveniently—never mentioned: homelessness, broken families, crime, malnutrition, death. Our entire society is build around cold calculations like this, and prendending we don’t.

I was watching Simon Sinek do a talk about management, and he said something that’s stuck in my head since:

Empathy is about the concern for that human being, not just their output. [..] Maybe they’ve had a hard day, maybe they’re just a bastard! We don’t know.

We can talk about how unemployment will never be 0%, or how disabilities and sickness can affect job performance and prospects. But that falls into that basic trap: we’re judging people based on their economic output, not out of concern or empathy for their well being.

We’re told that we can’t help people, or they won’t be motivated to work. Leave aside how people are supposed to go to a job interview without clean clothes, or apply for a loan without an address, or attend classes if they can’t eat: do we really think whipping people to improve morale actually works? Advocates for this need to just come clean and admit it: it’s entirely punitive.

I’ve only mentioned this once in fifteen years here, but I was a full-blown hikikomori for at least half a year after my mum died. I lost all motivation to work, study, or see people. It was soul-crushing; I felt like I was worthless. It took a lot of personal reflection and gentle patience from people who cared about me to coax me back to reality. Most people aren’t so lucky, and the unemployed are somehow grappling with bills, commitments, and fear on top of this. And with Covid uncertainty too!? I can’t begin to imagine how they do it; which is just how the press wants it. How it needs it to sell this bullshit, zero-sum game.

We have no idea how people got to where they are. Instead, we’ve been cynically conditioned to accept that the punishment for “laziness” is death. Because make no mistake, that is what the alternative is. And I don’t accept it. Nobody deserves to starve.

I also don’t buy the argument that we can’t afford to give people dignity, shelter, and food. Of course we can; it’s all about priorities.